With today’s use of internet blogs, social networks and the like, customers have a voice, an audience and they talk. They share their experience either with online business reviews, on blogs or social forums. When customers have a good experience, they may share it but if they have a bad experience, they often feel compelled to share their experience in an effort to keep others from having a similar bad experience.
So what does this mean to businesses?
It means businesses need to monitor the internet and keep their antennas up for customer feedback. Very often this feedback does not come directly to the company but is made very public on the internet. Organizations are beginning to use technology to improve their customer experience.
This is where text analytics can be a valuable tool. According to Wikipedia, the term text analytics “describes a set of linguistic, statistical and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence exploratory data analysis, research or investigation. It is synonymous with text mining.”
Text analytics can help translate words in conversations into meaningful information that can be used to improve the customer experience. Text analytics software can be programmed to match customer comment patterns with structured data that is tracked to assess the customer experience.
Text analytic software is being used more often to provide immediate feedback to management on the customer experience. Text Analytics is used to automate customer feedback and analyzes results for management. This new technology provides for a quick turnaround on the experience and perceptions of customers.
Text analytics captures, translates and analyzes linguistics from all electronic forms of verbatim comments and email communications. Text analytic software extracts keywords from the text and pulls key information about the customer experience. This information is sent to organizations in report form and is used to improve products and services.
Text analytics takes gathering customer feedback to a whole new level. This new tool is used to supplement traditional ways of gathering customer data which is captured in the form of customer surveys and company communications. Digitizing customer feedback information is less precise than formal data analysis but can supplement traditional data analysis in a timelier manner.
An advantage of text analytics is the speed by which it can be captured and relayed back to the organization. This immediate feedback process provides management with the opportunity to make immediate changes to improve the customer experience.
Text analytics is already used in larger organizations and is predicted to become more common in the near future. Organizations who have built customer satisfaction into their business strategy will embrace this technology to supplement current customer feedback systems.
Has anyone used text analytics software as part of your customer satisfaction strategy?
